University of Colorado at Boulder, Ann and H.J. Smead Aerospace Engineering Sciences

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Professor Nisar Ahmed

Dr. Ahmed received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY in January 2012, focusing on Dynamics, Systems and Controls with minors in ECE and Applied Math. From 2012-2013, he was a postdoctoral research associate in the Cornell Autonomous Systems Lab (ASL) with Professor Mark Campbell. He obtained his B.S. in Engineering (summa cum laude) in 2006 from The Cooper Union in his hometown of New York City. He joined the Aerospace Engineering Sciences Department at CU Boulder as an Assistant Professor in 2014.

Graduate Students

Stephen McGuire (Ph.D. student, Aerospace Engineering Sciences)

Steve holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Penn State University, and previously flew helicopters for the Marines and worked with Astrobotic. A NASA NSTRF Fellow, his research focuses on human-autonomy teaming for long-term and long-distance space exploration missions.

Brett Israelsen (Ph.D. student, Computer Science)

Brett comes from the other side of the mountains in Utah, and has an undergraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering and an M.S. in Chemical Engineering.

A former process controls engineer for Corning in upstate NY, his research focuses on statistical machine learning methods for human-autonomy teaming.

Luke Burks (Ph.D. student, Aerospace Engineering Sciences)

Luke calls Arkansas home, and earned his undergraduate degree in Physics from University of Arkansas. His research focuses on formal integrated planning and perception strategies for human-robot information gathering missions.

Steven Dourmashkin (Ph.D. student, Aerospace Engineering Sciences)

Steven earned his B.S. and M.Eng. degrees in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Cornell University in 2016. He is currently doing research on scalable decentralized data fusion strategies for cooperative GPS-denied navigation. He also is the founder and CEO of SpecDrums: http://www.specdrums.com/

Jonathan Manni (Ph.D. student, Aerospace Engineering Sciences)

Jonathan is the newest lab member and a Smead Scholar in the AES program (co-advised with Prof. Jay McMahon). He graduated from Calvin College in May of 2017 with a B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering and a minor in German. As an undergraduate, Jonathan participated in numerous study programs in Germany, including a research internship developing methods to improve crop sensing and imaging for autonomous agricultural robotic platforms at the Osnabrück University of Applied Sciences in Osnabrück, Germany. Jonathan’s research interests include spacecraft autonomy and autonomous planning, machine learning, and human-robot collaboration. Outside of his academic interests, he enjoys hiking, learning, tinkering, photography, and travel.

Jeremy Muesing (M.S. student, Aerospace Engineering Sciences)

Jeremy is Colorado native and graduated from the CU Boulder in 2017 with a B.S. in Aerospace Engineering and minor in Astrophysics. As a Discovery Learning Apprentice (DLA) research student for 2016-2017, he performed research on acoustic target localization for cooperative human-robot search missions.

Undergraduate Students

Ian Loefgren (B.S. Aerospace Engineering Sciences, Class of 2018)

Ian is an AES senior who joined the lab in March 2016. He has been helping out with the “Cops and Robots” project, and is also involved with the RAVEN (Rover-Air Visual Environment Navigation) Aerospace Senior project design team.

Luke Barbier (B.S. Computer Science and ECEE, Class of 2019)

Luke is a CS and ECEE junior who joined the lab in 2017. He has been helping out with the “Cops and Robots” project, and is also involved with the CU Boulder Robosub autonomous underwater vehicle team.